Saturday, November 26, 2011

How I Spent My Thanksgiving Break

I honestly can't remember what happened during the last week of school before we got off for break. All can I can remember is a blur of studying and doing last minute homework. :P

But, I do remember what happened on that Friday. I had to dress up in business clothes for my marketing class, so I borrowed Emily's gray sweater that had a collar to it, and I borrowed a pair of my mom's black slacks. And I finally wore this pair of black flats that I had bought ages ago but never wanted to wear before. They kept rubbing against my heels so I had to put band-aids on them. -__-"

What sucked -- other than the fact that I had to dress up in the first place -- was the fact that I had to wear the outfit all day, which meant that I had to present my Technology Article in front a whole bunch of guys about Take This Lollipop, a totally non-professional topic, lol. But yeah, I basically talked about this article. It's actually pretty interesting. You should definitely try the app out.

After school, I met up with Emily and Meethu at the library since Meethu wanted to see if she had gotten accepted into Georgia Tech. We had to wait forever for the computer to load and pull up the page, and then Meethu couldn't find the message saying if she was accepted or not. In the end, Emily found it, and Meethu wasn't accepted.

We were trying to figure out why they didn't accept her since she has really high SAT and ACT scores, and our only conclusion was that it was because she had a low GPA, which was only because she didn't do her homework a lot.

So yeah, Meethu was crying a little bit, and Emily and I felt really bad since we all knew that GA Tech was the only way she could escape her parents for the next few years. We ended up going to Zhen's parents' restaurant since Meethu wanted some Chinese food.

Meethu should have called her mom to tell her that Emily was taking her home, but after just finding out about GA Tech, she really didn't care since she already knew that her mom was already mad at her after what she said the night before. Apparently, she hinted that she might commit suicide. O__O

I know that Meethu would never really do anything that drastic (at least I hope she won't), but I was still surprised that she even said that to her parents! Anyway, we were just talking about how her parents were so unreasonable and how much that they sucked when Emily checked her phone and saw that she had missed a call from an unknown number.

It turned out that it was Meethu's mom calling, so Meethu had to call her back and lied, saying that it took a while to leave the school since she had to get some art stuff and since Emily had to go pick some stuff up at Publix. But she had to go home immediately, so we finished eating quickly and left.

After we dropped Meethu off, Emily told me that she was worried for Meethu during the break because of everything that had happened and the fact that her family was going on a cruise somewhere. Staying in a room with your family for a week with your parents mad at you and plenty of tension does not sound like a good idea at all.

Once I thought about it, I started worrying, too. You don't know how much I hate feeling helpless. I mean, I can't imagine having Meethu's parents at all. I'm usually thankful for the fact that my parents aren't home a lot and that they usually don't mind me doing whatever, but I really love my parents for not trying to dictate my life. Sure, they want me to get a degree for some job, but it's not like they're forcing me to do it; they just want me to have an easy job that pays a lot so that I can have a better life than they have.

Later that night, when I got on FB, Meethu sent me a message saying that Zack was mad at her, and I got so angry. He was mad at her because he thought that she had handled the situation immaturely, wanting to get over him because of a dream (and also probably because she had never told him that she had an arranged marriage until then). I thought that he was being ridiculous and that it was totally unfair for Meethu because her day was already shitty, and he just made things worse.

I had to get off to eat dinner with my family, and when I got back on, I had received a message from Meethu saying that she was doing something stupid again and wouldn't tell me about it until after it was over, which worried me a bit. I messaged her back, asking her why did she have to be so impulsive, and when she answered me back a few hours later, she made a joke and then proceeded to tell me that she was stuck in her bathroom window and that Seth was with her.

I inferred that she was sneaking out of her house and was going somewhere since Seth and her had told us that the only way to sneak out of their houses was through their bathroom window, and since Meethu couldn't drive, she recruited Seth to come and take her somewhere since he lived in the same apartment complex as her and wouldn't have had a problem sneaking out of his house, too.

She never answered me back, so I kind of forgot about her crazy scheme for a while since she still didn't tell me what she was doing, so I didn't have anything to fret about other than the whole, what if she gets caught problem that teens usually think about when planning some against the rules.

Then, Shelle called me and we talked for a while. We ended up talking about clothes since I really wanted to buy some from Aeropostale since the store was having a 40% off everything sale [everything's 50-70% off today]. In the end, I bought half of what I originally had in my cart and another jacket and pair of sleeping pants for Shelle and had the promise to get rid of some clothes since I already had too much.

So, after reading for a bit, I decided to clean out my closet since I didn't feel like reading anymore. At the time, it was already past midnight [I know, I do the weirdest things late at night :P]. Then, as I was in the middle of trying on a shirt that I was debating on donating to Goodwill, my phone started ringing. It was Seth. My first thought was that something had happened to Meethu since he was the last person she was with.

But it was almost one in the morning and I was in that stage of being tired but at the same time, not, so I answered the phone, warily asking him why he was calling me so late at night. Then I heard Meethu's loud laugh and figured out that it was her on the phone.

I guess they had put me on speaker since I heard Seth asking me to guess where they were at, and I had jokingly said, "Please don't be at Zack's house."

I'm not sure if they had heard me since one of them said, "What?" but I felt too lazy to say it again, so I asked them where they were at, and they eventually told me that they were in the driveway next to Zack's house. They weren't in his driveway because of what they had written on it in chalk, which was this:

Yeah, Meethu texted me later telling about how there were two stuffed animals and Hershey's kisses on the words. -__- She was really happy doing all of that.

They asked me if I wanted to hang out with them, but I wasn't sure if I could sneak out since my mom was home and had turned on the alarm before she went to bed. I didn't want to turn off the alarm since I thought that it would wake up my mom, so I thought that I could leave through the back door since I had never saw any wires or anything to show that the alarm was hooked up to it. Stupid reasoning, I know, but I blamed it on the fact that it was late so I wasn't thinking clearly.

So, when I cracked opened the door, the alarm went off. I ran to the alarm and quickly turned it off and figured that my mom had to have woken up from it. So I was downstairs, on the phone, trying to come up with an excuse while waiting for my mom to wake up and come downstairs.

Yeah, it didn't happen. I stayed downstairs and waited for the alarm company to call our house like usual. After that, I went back upstairs. Then, I heard my mom's footsteps and thought that I was finally going to get in trouble. Didn't happen.

She just called out and told us to go to sleep since it was so late. I found out later the next morning that she had thought that Brian was the one who triggered the alarm even though the lights in his room were off the whole time whereas my room's lights were still on and I was pretty loud on the phone...

But whatever, I never got in trouble, and it turned out that Seth and Meethu were just going to go home in the end since his truck didn't start for a minute, which worried them, lol. So we hung up on each other after they reached their apartments and I finished looking through all of my clothes.

I spent the next day babysitting and reading until one of my uncles came home early. Then I read some more and caught up on my blogs and stuff online. :)

The day after that was when my friends and I had a Twilight movie marathon at my house. Shanice and Jackie came over around 10 in the morning, and Seth came over 15 minutes later while we were watching Twilight. Jeez, the movie was a lot more boring than I remembered. The little bits of humor was only interesting for a second, so it was kind of hard to pay attention to the movie, which was the main reason why I was baking cookies for us to eat, lol.

We decided to skip New Moon since no one was sure that they could handle watching all of the movies in one sitting, and Shanice promised me that the only thing I would be looking forward to in the movie was the shirtless guys, so we migrated to the game room to watch Eclipse on my bro's Xbox 360 since I had downloaded a copy online the day before.

Eclipse was much better compared to Twilight since there was a lot more action scenes in it. Although, I still wasn't paying attention to it at times since Seth kept on trying to steal my Bumblebee Pillow Pet, the dork.

After that, we decided to eat lunch, since it was already 2-3, so I started making instant Pho while Seth raided my room for things to play with. I swear, he was like a hyper little kid who wouldn't listen to anyone. -__-"

When I finally got him to go back downstairs, he ended up grabbing Shanice's phone and started calling people on her contacts list and hanging up on them after they answered or just letting Shanice talk while trying to grab her phone back. Then Seth had the great idea of prank calling people on his phone's contacts since it used to somehow get people's numbers automatically add it to his contact's list, which is why he has over 200 phone numbers on his phone.

So, while we were about to eat, Shanice and I started going through his contacts and calling people. I remember for one person's voicemail, I started doing that heavy breathing that you usually hear in scary movies. I didn't do it for long since I was about to bust out laughing, lol.

Then, I called Tyler and we started messing around with him after he figured out who it was. We didn't talk for long because he hung up on us since he was in the middle of a job, the lame-o pants. :P

We called Sydne afterwards and I grabbed my iPod and used the VoiceChanger app to leave a hilarious voicemail for her since she didn't pick up her phone. We wanted to use the app for some more prank calls, but it was almost four, and we needed to leave soon in order to make it to the next Breaking Dawn showing.

I didn't expect the place to be so crowded since I figured that most of the fans would have already watched it during the midnight premiere or any other day of its release, but then I remembered that it was Sunday, which meant that a lot of people didn't have to go to work...

But yeah, it was so crowded that we had to sit in the front part of the movie theater. It wasn't that bad since we managed to find a row long enough to fit all of us that was in the center, and we were only three rows from the back of the section.

Afterwards, we went back to my house to hang. Seth had to go home a little bit after we came back, so it was just Jackie, Shanice, and me. We talked for a couple of hours until Jackie had to go home, so after dropping her off, Shanice and I went to McDonald's for dinner and didn't go back to my house until an hour later.

We talked some more and I didn't realize until then that we hadn't hung out like that in a long time, talking about our insecurities and everything in between and joking about everything else. It was nice. :)

On Monday, Brian and I received something in the mail that I was really excited about getting. I'll show it to you tomorrow in my IMM post. :P

Shelle came home on Tuesday to take Brian out to lunch for his birthday. I tagged along since I didn't have to babysit. We went to Olive Garden, which was my first time there. The food was good although I was already almost full after just eating the salad and trying a breadstick, lol.

We went to Best Buy to get covers for Brian and my thinger that we received on Monday and then went to La Berry for dessert. Seth and Rebecca and her little sister met us there after a while so we hung out for a bit, but we had to leave soon since Shelle had to get back to Mercer by two because of her job.

During a past conversation that Krista and I had, she told me that the guy that she sort of had a crush on looked really good wearing a plain white t-shirt, and her friends all agreed that he looked hot wearing it. I didn't think much about it until that day when I saw Seth wearing a plain white t-shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans and looking really cute.

Argh! I'm still not sure what my feelings for him are since there's so many different factors to it! D: But, like I said in some other post, I'm not going to do anything about it. It's pretty much pointless, and I don't wanna ruin anything. I'm perfectly fine enjoying eye-candy. XD

On Wednesday, I still didn't have to babysit for some reason, so when Emily texted me to see if I wanted to go to Steak 'n Shake for lunch, I agreed since we hadn't seen each other all break and still hadn't had lunch, lol. However, I wasn't that hungry and Emily was just craving onion rings (ewww :P), so I only ordered a small plate of cheese fries and a white chocolate milkshake, which was really good.

After we finished eating, we went back to my house to hang for a bit since Emily didn't want to go home; that meant that she had to vacuum the house, lol. She texted me later asking if Brian and I wanted to spend Thanksgiving with her and her family and go shopping afterwards the next day since our parents weren't going to be home.

You see, Mommy had originally planned on the whole family going to Louisiana to spend Thanksgiving with some of her cousins that I do not remember ever meeting, but Shelle couldn't go because she had to work on the day that we were supposed to leave, and then I couldn't go since I found out that we were going to come back home on Sunday and I really needed to study for my Calc test, and then Brian didn't want to go for some reason, so Brian and I were planning on being home alone while Shelle was in Macon and our parents in Louisiana.

When Emily told her mom this, her mom wanted us to come over for Thanksgiving since she didn't think that anyone should spend it alone even though I already told Emily that we would prolly spend it with our cousins that I babysit, lol.

So yeah, the 'rents said that we could, so the next day, Emily picked us up around 10:30 in the morning and took us back to her house. We played games until lunch, which Emily did not lie about; there was SO MUCH food it was insane. Even though we weren't the only guests there, there was still a lot of food leftover for dinner. And plenty of dessert, too.

After lunch, we watched Sherlock Holmes and proceeded to take a nap afterwards. At least, Emily and I tried to take a nap before our little bros decided to play with the remote control helicopter anyway.

Then, we ate a snack while deciding on what we all wanted to buy at which stores and figuring out the times that the stores would be opening during the night. In case I never mentioned this before, Emily's mom is a HUGE coupon clipper. Their house is full of stuff that she either got really cheap or basically was paid to buy. It was pretty insane just looking at their stocks of stuff. O__O

But yeah, her mom takes Black Friday shopping very seriously. Every year, they go shopping from different stores all through the night until eight or nine in the morning. Last year, her mom dropped Emily home after eight in the morning and then went back out shopping until 11. INSANE. :c

So yeah, we ate dinner around seven and then went to Walmart around 7:30 since it was opening the earliest at 10. We walked around to see where we needed to go, and then went to the movies section that was relocated near the front in the food section to stake out our spots. Emily was going to grab X-Men: First Class on Blu-Ray and two movies for this one lady who was near us, Brian was at different pile of movies getting two copies of Despicable Me and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and I was even further away from the both of them going to grab seasons one and two of Fringe.

A few minutes before 9:30, everyone but me saw two police officers leading a woman in handcuffs. I later found out from a woman who was friends with some of the people near me that there was a huge fight over at the sheets section. Emily found out later at Kohl's that apparantly, one woman leaned over to grab some sheets early while another woman reached in and grabbed her wallet. The first woman found out and pulled the thief's hair and the brawl started with that.

Then, a minute later, we saw a group of police officers running down the main walkway near us and start hearing a commotion. There was another fight and people were throwing things at each other. The people around me were muttering about how we could grab the DVDs now and no one could do anything about it. I wasn't sure if they really were going to do it, but a second later, the workers were telling us that we could break the wraps and get our DVDs, so I quickly grabbed Fringe and ran over to Emily since she had the cart. Brian ran by, dropped his DVDs, and then ran over to the waffle-makers since he volunteered to get them while Emily and I stopped by the sleep wear section to get fuzzy pants since it was close to the waffle makers.

I grabbed a pair of pants while Emily got a whole bunch. I left her to try to find Brian since the whole walkway was congested with people and their carts. I found him and showed him where Emily was while I went to the guy section to get Seth's Christmas present. While I was trying to find my way back to Emily, her mom had already found her, and we were on our way to the cash registers.

Even though we got to get our stuff early, none of the registers would check anyone out until 10, so we waited in line for a while. In the end, we were finished with Walmart around 10:30, which was pretty surprising.

Emily's mom took Brian and Emily's little siblings home to play games or watch a movie while Emily and I rode with her aunt to her house so that she could let out her dogs. We stayed there for a bit until Emily's mom called to ask us where we were at since we were supposed to be waiting in line at Target.

Unlike Walmart, we had to wait outside until the store opened, and wow, that line was endless. It stretched all the way until prolly near the end of the entire building. So we waited for around an hour in the cold. It wasn't until midnight and we were near the front of the building that there was another fight near the front of us. Apparently, this woman tried to cut in front of this guy and he cussed at her or something, so she started fighting. Luckily, some police were near so the fight didn't get out of hand.

So we ran into target, splitting up from Emily's mom to get our stuff and ran into Austin, a friend of mine who only came to get Pokemon cards, the dork, and met up with Emily's mom near the front in a record amount of time.

Then we went to Kohl's. Emily was still looking for a bed-set for her dorm room and I was just looking around, but neither of us wanted anything, so we went next door to Best Buy where her mom was at since she didn't want anything from Kohl's earlier.

The lines in Best Buy were insanely long. Maybe it was because we were usually one of the first people to be at the registers at all of the other stores, so I didn't see the epically long lines of the people who were waiting behind us, but Best Buy's lines were SO LONG. [that's what she said XD]

So yeah, I grabbed an Xbox Live Gold card for my bro and Emily and I went to find her mom, who was already waiting in line. We ended up going around the store a few times to check the prices of some stuff that her mom wanted to see if they were cheaper here, and I found a pair of headphones that I really, really, really wanted.

Beats by Dr. Dre

They're friggin AMAZINGNESS. But the cheapest ones cost around $150 at RadioShack, and my logical, rational side told me that I really didn't need a new pair of headphones that cost so much when I need a new iPod even more. :\

So yeah, there went my dreams. :P

As we were leaving Best Buy, I ran into another friend of mine from Engineering while we were going to the little Chik-fil-a stand that was set up in between Kohl's and Best Buy. Emily's mom bought me some coffee and a chicken sandwich which we finished eating on the way to the car.

After that, we went to Macon to go to their JCPenny at the mall. It didn't open until four, which was fine since Aeropostale was already open, so Emily went with me there while I looked for a hoodie for my bro. I ended up buying a hat, too... -__-"

We came back to Emily's mom's spot in line to wait for a few minutes before the doors opened, and the stampede of people went inside. We stopped by the lady in the front to get a free door-buster gift, which was a small Mickey Mouse snowglobe.

We walked around the store a few times trying to get everything that we wanted and then trying to find a short line. Didn't really work. All of the lines were pretty long and we were all pretty tired already.

Afterwards, we went to Sports Academy so that Emily's mom could buy a gun for Justin while Emily and I went to find some jerseys that her mom also wanted. We found them pretty quickly, went to her mom, was sent back out to find some other stuff, rinse and repeat. We were so tired, after her mom didn't need anything else, and was waiting in line to get the gun, Emily and I went to the front of the store, since there was supposed to be a bench to sit at, but we didn't find it.

So we sat on some running equipment for a bit until Emily suggested that laying on the bench presses would be more comfy, which it was. So we were lying on them for a while, waiting for her mom to finish up. We eventually got up to find her mom and aunt, and by then, they were already near a register to be rung up.

Since we didn't need to go anywhere else, we went to eat breakfast since it was tradition for them. We ate at Cracker Barrel, and by then, it was already 7:30 in the morning. That was the first time I had pulled an all-nighter in a long time, and I was basically a zombie throughout the whole meal, lol.

We agreed to go to the other Walmart in town after we finished eating before finally heading home, so we went in to see what was leftover, and I ended up getting five movies, which were all less than $2 each. Then I found a special edition of the first season of The Walking Dead for only $10, so I bought it as a part of Krista's Christmas present.

all of the movies that I bought during Black Friday

After Walmart, we finally went back to Emily's house around 9 where I woke up my bro and we finally went home. I took a shower, sent Krista a text to not call or text me when she was going to come over while Brian went to see if I had to babysit [I didn't], and then took a nap until 12 when Krista came over.

We ate lunch and then played one of Krista's Game Cube games. When we got tired of it, we played DDR until we got tired of that. I was doing really bad, and I'm still not sure if it was because I was still tired or what. But after that, we ate dinner, which consisted of cheesey instant mashed potatoes and fried sausages.

Then we went on a walk as we usually did. We talked about anything and everything as usual. I realized that I usually didn't know something about me until I talked it out to someone (usually Krista). Like, I didn't know something about me until the words started tumbling out of my mouth.

Somehow, we started talking about our style of clothes, and Krista told me that I dress like an indie person with my skinny jeans and Converses and jacket whereas Krista dressed according to her mood. And we realized that teenagers have so many styles because we're still trying to figure out who we are and who we want to be.

By the time we were walking, it was already dark, so I took a whole bunch of pictures that interested me. I started taking a whole bunch of pictures without my flash to do some creeper pictures, which turned out to be pretty cool.

Then, I just started to take pictures of things with and without flash to compare, and I had some pretty cool results. These are some of the pics that I took:

We came back home around 9:30 and watched Vampires Suck, which was pretty funny during the moments that I was actually awake enough to pay attention. :P Anyway, Krista stayed the night and left earlier today.

My parents called and said that they'd be coming home around midnight, which kind of irriated me since I thought that they were coming home tomorrow, which was the reason why I couldn't go to Louisiana in the first place. But whatever, it's 12, and they're still not home yet.

So yeah, that was how I spent my Thanksgiving Break. Like Fall Break, I didn't expect to go out or have a bunch of friends over during the majority of the break, but I did, which meant that I didn't get to read as much as I hoped to. But, I wasn't really much in a read-a-book mood during the second half of the week, so I don't think I would have read that many books anyway.

But, here's a pic of all of the physical books that I managed to read over break. I hoped to read at least a book a day, and I guess I did even though three of the books were also manga that I read online...